Get ready to conquer these and other 2020 trends with PIM and PXM! Learn how PIM and PXM can help your company make next year its best yet.
Believe it or not, 2019 is almost over. Before too long, the year will have passed us by, and brands and retailers will be returning to normalcy after a hectic holiday season.
That means it’s time for companies of all shapes and sizes to start preparing to succeed in the new year — but what exactly does that mean?
To answer that question, we’ve searched far and wide to find predictions on what trends, technologies, initiatives, and more are in store for the year to come. Here’s a recap of notable trends happening in both B2C and B2B, and our perspective on how they apply to managing your product information. If you want more information on these trends or find out more about what’s coming up in the next year, click through on the links to learn more.
Trend #1 – Help customers move quickly
The days of the one-size-fits-all experience are coming to an end. Already, consumers increasingly expect companies to provide compelling, convenient, and one-of-a-kind experiences tailored to exactly their wants and needs. As Forbes says, “Today’s consumers don’t just want their products fast, they want to be able to get information about them quickly,” and this trend is one of the reasons AI is becoming important in digital retail.
As we have blogged before consumers should be able to get product information anytime, anywhere. Retailers can use AI-based technologies to help ensure that product information is accurate and complete. These technologies can verify if the information a retailer has is accurate, and can also uncover additional product attribute information that may be missing. AI can also be used to suggest better product categorization or even suggest missing attributes in your product data, or better product categorization.
And of course, content also needs to be presented in the proper context for the channel it’s being viewed on — desktop-based eCommerce websites, for example, have different rules than social shopping offerings or mobile apps.
Trend #2 — Breaking borders
Retail Touchpoints just published their annual eCommerce Tech Preview for 2020. This forward-looking report offers perspectives from a dozen industry experts. One interesting trend is enhancements in managing product content and how to ensure it is tailored for use globally as well as in local markets.
We believe context is king when it comes to product information. Cross-border commerce is a growing phenomenon in the internet age — customers are projected to spend $3.5 trillion on purchases from merchants outside their own country in 2019 alone. What’s more, that figure is set to balloon to nearly $5 trillion in just two years. With this increase in international spending comes obvious opportunities for merchants as well as new challenges for product information.
Just as your content needs to be tailored to meet the unique needs and advantages of a specific channel, it also needs to be put in context for the geographic market a customer lives in. That means thinking globally and acting locally by expanding to new markets and giving them product information in the language they speak every day. It’s about more than just language, however — you also need to make plenty of other changes to localize your product catalog. That could include everything from adjusting measurements for local units and values, to changing product images to fit the context of a given country, even changing your entire product assortment.
Trend #3 — Brand creation
A report by Summit Partners on eCommerce trends includes the observation that brand creation is changing. Nowhere is this occurring more rapidly than in the context of social interaction and engagement in a community.
Creating a brand today is as much about external factors as it is about internal factors — and product information is at the center of all of it. Building trust and a relationship with a customer requires that the brand provide accurate, correct, and consistent information. If customers don’t feel your information can be relied upon for one reason or another, they’ll surely abandon your store for a competitor’s, or just abandon a potential purchase altogether.
It’s also important to ensure that your product information isn’t too sterile — even in the B2B market. Customers are far more likely to make a purchase if they consider your customer experience to be a positive and exciting one.
Trend #4 — Social shopping
Another trend highlighted in the Forbes article is the social shopping phenomenon. It’s no secret that social media has a huge influence on commerce these days — after all, there’s a whole industry of social media influencers doing just that every day.
Social media has long played a role in industries like fashion, home furnishings, sporting goods, and more. Already, 3.5 billion people around the world are connected to social accounts, and what’s more, 72% of consumers on Instagram and 55% of those on Pinterest users have made a purchase based on something they saw on the site. Now, as platforms like Facebook and Instagram add direct eCommerce features, they are becoming an even more important sales engine.
Other brands have elected to create their own social media platforms and integrations in hopes of better connecting with like-loving consumers, a trend that will likely continue into the new year. In either case, it’s crucial to include plenty of accurate, consistent product information, presented in context for the particular social media work, in order to find success with consumers.
Trend #5 — B2B investment in social media
B2C players aren’t the only ones going social, however. While social media hasn’t been host to the same number of B2B integrations, more and more of these sellers are moving to social platforms to reach new customers.
But while they are embracing social media in much the same way that consumers have, B2B buyers do so in different ways, and through different platforms than consumers typically utilize — and it’s crucial to know the difference. The key is finding the channel your target audience is most active on, paying specific attention to emerging social media channels or niche platforms that speak to a certain demographic or interest group.
According to a piece from B2B Marketing Zone, LinkedIn will likely be especially relevant in the B2B space. More than 590 million active professionals are on Linkedin and 80% of B2B leads from social media come from LinkedIn. The platform has over 60 million senior-level influencers, 40 million decision-makers, and 10.7 million opinion leaders, and is predicted to keep growing in the near future. This means that product information must be tailored to fit this business-focused platform.
Trend #6 — SEO must be kept up to date
Like social media, search engines are becoming a growing driver of B2B sales as more B2B organizations embrace eCommerce and omnichannel offerings. But, as B2B Marketing Zone points out, showing up at the top of these customer searches is often easier said than done.
Google changes its algorithm constantly—several times a day in fact, and from hundreds to thousands of times per year. Because Google changes its algorithm constantly, it pays to have dedicated SEO specialists to keep up with changes so you can remain among the top search results. Fortunately, while it remains crucial to remain as current as possible when it comes to SEO changes, the best way to ensure that your site ranks well among competitors is to craft a compelling, high-quality and relevant content.
It’s also important to be aware of how new innovations and emerging touchpoints are changing how customers search for products, and by extension, how SEO is calculated. As voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa become an increasing part of commerce, SEO results will skew increasingly in favor of the ways in which these new searches are conducted.
These are just a few of the emerging trends we’ve highlighted. Check out the remaining predictions in the articles and posts here and look for trends that are applicable in your industry!
Get ready to conquer these and other 2020 trends with PIM and PXM! Learn how PIM and PXM can help your company make next year its best yet by reading our blog on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success or get in touch today!
Master omnichannel commerce! Discover how to build a successful multichannel practice in this new eBook!
It’s time to go omnichannel.
Not too long ago, B2B and B2C organizations alike had just one or two sales channels to worry about: their brick-and-mortar store and a print catalog. But those simplistic days have gone the way of the dinosaur, and the advent of online, mobile, and other connected devices have forced merchants of every shape and size to embrace multichannel and omnichannel commerce by selling products not just via physical stores and catalogs, but through online stores and marketplaces, mobile apps, and more.
Connecting with customers in an omnichannel world is easier said than done. It requires that companies craft compelling customer experiences. Creating these top-notch customer experiences requires the building of near-perfect product experiences, which use consistent product information delivered in context for the channel customers are using, wherever, and whomever, their buyers are.
That’s where Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) come in. These solutions put customer interaction at the center of everything you do, ensuring your product information is complete, accurate, relevant, and delivered on time, to the right place, everywhere your customers are.
Ready to master omnichannel commerce?
To help you handle these challenges, we’ve partnered with BigCommerce to bring you a guide to how PIM and PXM can help you create successful omnichannel practices. It’s designed to help you discover and master all aspects of your multichannel business to boost conversions, reduce product returns, increase revenue, and make your team happier and more efficient in the process.
This valuable eBook will teach you how to:
Understand omnichannel sales and growth
Build successful multichannel operations
Put product information in the proper context for each and every channel
Scale operations using high-quality, contextual information
Tackle cross-border expansion and localization
Create a compelling and effective omnichannel strategy
Scale your operations Product Experience Management! Discover how to use PXM practices to grow and scale your organization across channels and locales in our eBook.
People booking leisure travel are often looking for a new, exciting, or relaxing experience, and as experience has become more important to consumers,…
People booking leisure travel are often looking for a new, exciting, or relaxing experience, and as experience has become more important to consumers, the travel and hospitality industry is seeing robust growthin vacation and travel spending.
Higher spending levels on travel means more customers sitting in the airport waiting for their flight. This should be a boon to merchants and retailers who call airport terminals their home. After all, airports already have plenty of the makings of great customer experiences and often have no shortage of restaurants and retail stores to keep travelers busy while they wait for their flight.
However, despite this diverse and often luxurious offering, many consumers find shopping or dining at the airport to be a passable experience at best, and often much worse.
It’s a bleak scene — but luckily, it’s all beginning to change. Recently, smart merchants and retailers in airports are increasingly investing in providing better customer and product experiences — and seeing results.
Fraport
High prices, a lack of research-ready product information and omnichannel shopping features often mean that scoping out purchasing or buying new items at an airport retail storefront was like taking a trip back in time to a mall in 1985, shopping without any modern conveniences or innovations.
But at Germany’s Frankfurt Airport, the shopping experience is more akin to a major brand’s flagship store than an outdated strip mall. Travelers can use the airports’ omnichannel tools, including eCommerce sites and mobile apps to find real-time information about what retailers are operating in a given airport or terminal, their hours, and even the products they have available for purchase. This helps consumers feel more comfortable with the airport shopping experience, encouraging increased spending before travelers board a flight. And, travelers have an additional choice: items purchased at the airport can be delivered to the gate at boarding time, or even shipped home. In this case, shopping at the airport while otherwise waiting becomes “time well spent” – a cornerstone concept of the experience economy.
By providing a wider array of product information and improved product experiences, Fraport was able to leverage omnichannel selling in airport shopping which led to an increase in average order value as well as an improvement in the customer experience.
Lagardere
Everyone likes a discount. This may be the biggest reason that duty-free retail has grown to become a $67.74 billion market as of 2018. But while cheaper prices are compelling to many consumers, research shows that modern shoppers tend to value the experience that accompanies as much or even more than its price when making purchasing decisions.
Source: Walker
Walker found that organizations believe that by 2020 customer experience will increasingly become more important than price in their business strategy. So, when Lagardère Travel Retail sought to bring its like of Aelia Duty Free stores into the omnichannel age, the company prioritized the digital customer experience.
Now, shoppers can access the company’s network of more than 300 stores spread out over 50 airports across 18 countries from their computer or mobile device. They also have access to a wider and more diverse catalog of products after Lagardere worked to optimize its catalog update and product enrichment processes to bring new products to market more quickly and give customers more information about the items available for purchase.
This has given Lagardère Travel Retail new revenue streams and avenues to interact with customers and helped ensure that customers shopping via any channel walk away from their duty-free buying experience satisfied.
Give travelers an experience worth writing home about
Neither of the top-notch customer experiences we’ve discussed here would be possible without near-perfect product experiences.
Product experience is the core component of any compelling customer experience — it includes all of your product data, information, and assets, any content that helps define your omnichannel customer experience. With a Product Experience Management (PXM) solution, your team can harness the power of product information and use it to create a compelling experience for all of your eCommerce customers.
That way, customers looking to purchase travel and hospitality products who come to your eCommerce site, mobile app, or any other sales channel, are greeted with a buying experience that meets — and even beats — their already high expectations.
Give travelers an experience worth writing home about! Learn how PIM and PXM can help take omnichannel experiences to new heights by reading our blog on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success or get in touch today!
Akeneo Raises $46 Million to Expand Its Leadership in Product Experience Management
With more than 60,000 installations of our Community Edition, we are proud to say that Akeneo, in less than five years, has become the most used PIM platform in the world — but we are only at the beginning of our journey.
I’m proud to share some exciting news with our Akeneo community: The company has secured $46 million in a growth round of funding.
Our new round is led by Summit Partners, a leading U.S. investment firm, and includes participation from our existing investors; Alven, Partech, Salesforce Ventures, and Stephan Dietrich. We are honored to join the Summit Partners’ family of great companies, which include Uber, Philz Coffee, and Webex.
This is great recognition for the entire Akeneo team and the work we have accomplished thus far.
A lot has happened since our previous funding round, led by Partech in late 2016. We launched several new products, grew our team to include 180 talented individuals across five countries, established strategic partnerships with Adobe/Magento and Salesforce, and have seen our community undergo enormous growth. With more than 60,000 installations of our Community Edition, we are proud to say that Akeneo, in less than five years, has become the most used PIM platform in the world.
But we are only at the beginning of our journey.
With great power comes great responsibility
A funding round is just a means to an end. With all the cash and the support we now have to fuel our growth, we’re committed to continuing to execute on our vision of building the market’s standard for Product Experience Management.
To quote Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO of Algolia: “In the end, we will not be judged by how much we raised but by how much we delivered.”
So, let’s take this opportunity to see what’s coming next for Akeneo.
What lies ahead
We released many product improvements and new modules during the past three years — including Reference entities and Onboarder, among others — and we successfully introduced our Cloud offering in 2017.
But there is still a lot more to do:
Continuously improve Akeneo PIM to remain the most user-friendly and efficient PIM solution available
Unleash more Product Data Intelligence capabilities to automate product enrichment workflows with AI
Further develop Akeneo PXM platform capabilities to allow our ecosystem to build and benefit more easily from SaaS-compatible add-ons.
Our primary area of investment with this round will be in our R&D, to continue to innovate and keep pace with our customer and community needs.
Embrace our open source roots
The software industry we are living in needs more transparency and collaboration to reinvent itself. Black boxes and vendor lock-in models are from another time, and should disappear.
What makes Akeneo unique is the combination of our best-of-breed enterprise solution and our vibrant open source community. Most open source vendors tend to, at some point in their growth, consider their community offerings as competitors for their enterprise businesses and therefore start slowly killing them.
We are — and will continue to be — determined and firm believers in the open SaaS model. We believe that our open source edition is our strongest asset and that we need, now more than ever, to keep investing in our ecosystem of partners and developers.
There is still a long way to go, but this is an incredible journey, and we are proud to share it with you!
It’s nearly time to upgrade to Magento 2 — and your PIM solution will be an important part of this process.
It’s nearly time to upgrade to Magento 2 — and your PIM solution will be an important part of this process. Need proof? Check out the newest white paper from our partner StrikeTru to discover more about the quickly-nearing transition, and explain why PIM will be so crucial to Magento 2.
It’s almost time to update to Magento 2 — is your company ready to make the switch?
With the deadline fast approaching for Magento 1 customers to upgrade to Magento 2, it is becoming crucial to ensure that all aspects be evaluated to ensure a smooth transition. The Magento 2 upgrade project is really a re-implementation and needs to be approached as such. The complexity and size of that effort will be proportional to the complexity of current customizations to migrate, site improvements to make, and data cleansing and data migration involved.
Any internal user experience improvements will likely require a modern Product Information Management (PIM) platform. Any customer experience or sales growth enhancement objectives will likely need rich, granular, and high-quality product content that is best managed in a modern PIM.
In this new white paper, Vik Gundoju, a partner at StrikeTru and a thought leader in PIM and eCommerce solutions, discusses how to make the most out of your Magento 2 upgrade and understand:
Why PIM matters for Magento 2 upgrade
The top commerce and content challenges addressed by PIM
Recommended implementation roadmap for PIM, and
Features of PIMGento, the fastest Akeneo to Magento integration connector
Solve seasonal sales struggles with PIM and PXM! Learn how PIM and PXM can help your company take advantage of seasonal shifts in marketplace trends, be more agile and efficient, and update and expand your product catalog with ease.
As sad as it may be to say, summer is once again coming to a close.
Soon enough, the days will get shorter, the leaves will change, and the crisp breeze of autumn will fill the air. That means school buses will be roaming the streets and that teachers, students, and parents will once again be gearing up for another year of learning. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to pack up our sandals and break out the ski boots.
It also means that distributors, manufacturers, retailers, marketplaces, and other B2B and B2C businesses alike are turning over their sales catalog. Out with the summer styles, warm-weather wares, and beachside basics, in with the cozy coats, indoor indulgences, and winter weather equipment.
But making these seasonal changes in your product catalog isn’t as simple as flipping the calendar to the next month. Updating or expanding a product catalog is often a monumental undertaking for nearly all companies. It means onboarding new products from manufacturers and suppliers, adding new photos and other digital assets, and updating hundreds or thousands of SKUs on multiple sales channels in time for the new season, all without succumbing to errors and inaccuracies in product information.
Add it all up, and it’s enough to make even the most resilient retail product manager or distribution diehard want to go into hibernation until it’s all said and done. What’s more, this isn’t a one-time problem — product assortments change regularly due to changes in consumer tastes, seasons, and even new legislation or regulation.
Don’t despair — prepare! You can get ready for seasonal shifts in product catalogs and information by unleashing the power of your Product Information Management (PIM) solution. This powerful tool can help you easily and efficiently deal with the challenges that arise from a new season making its presence felt.
Model & automate
One of the biggest shifts that often accompanies a change in season for B2B and B2C organizations is the change in product assortment. Many companies will offer entirely different product lines or collections for different seasons, often with little-to-no crossover or overlap.
Manually deleting products and adding new ones to your product catalog in time for each new season is a truly time-consuming and error-prone process, one that can drive your team nuts and cripple your efficiency. The same can be said of dealing with photos, videos, and other digital product assets can also quickly become a nightmare. Relying on a PIM for help with implementing product catalog changes, on the other hand, makes it dramatically easier for product managers.
PIM tools automate processes, easily model new categories, offer bulk editing, and allow you to centrally manage product data and digital assets. They also make it easier and more efficient to include certain products in these catalogs only for the time of the sale to create a limited-time catalog or product groupings.
Get emotional
It’s time to create some warm, fuzzy feelings on a cold winter’s night.
Whether you’re getting your catalog ready for the Christmas rush, helping customers delight the objects of affection for Valentine’s day, or coming up with a spooky surprise for Halloween, emotionally compelling product experiences are catnip to seasonal consumers. But if your team is stuck dealing with tedious, time-consuming work like manual product updates or digital asset management, they won’t be very inspired.
A PIM can help liberate your team so they can set their creativity free. It takes manual tasks off their plates, allowing them more time to craft compelling product descriptions to help stir emotion and build trust in potential buyers. What’s more, PIM can help ensure that products are put into context for each of the several sales channels you use to reach them. Your objective is to assemble a unified set of product information, and to also make sure that the “right” information appears in the print catalog, the eCommerce store, and your mobile app.
Now that’s managing the product experience!
Pick up the pace
As anyone who’s wished for summer to be just a little bit longer can tell you, the seasons change fast. If you can’t keep up with the pace of these changes, you’ll get left behind, and could find yourself trying to sell Christmas decorations in July!
When it comes to seasonal sales, time is of the essence and organizations can’t afford to miss the seasonal window. A long catalog enrichment process could doom your sale if the catalog isn’t available during peak buying times.
PIM significantly increases productivity and helps you keep up with changing seasons — without making careless errors or providing inaccurate product information. PIM solutions can help foster collaboration across the teams involved in onboarding new products, streamline the catalog update process, eliminate errors and inconsistencies in product information and ensure that any updates made within the system are distributed to all of the appropriate channels. It can also further help improve sales as it supports the multi-channel marketing of seasonal campaigns and bundled offers.
Solve Seasonal Sales Struggles With PIM
Make sure your team is ready to conquer the Christmas rush, beat the summer heat, go back to school, and bloom with the flowers of spring by arming them with PIM.
PIM lets you move with speed and agility all year long, whether you want to do a limited-edition collection or want to do a small specialty catalog for back-to-school. It makes seasonal and contextual sales and responding to customer moods and rapidly changing trends breeze.
Solve seasonal sales struggles with PIM! Learn how PIM can help your team conquer expansions with relative ease by reading our blogs on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success and Expanding To New Locales today!
Two years ago, we launched our cloud edition, offering two flavors to benefit from our enterprise PIM. We have had amazing traction with this offer an…
Two years ago, we launched our cloud edition, offering two flavors to benefit from our enterprise PIM. We have had amazing traction with this offer and we’re glad to announce that more than 80% of our new enterprise customers are choosing the cloud edition!
Following the cloud launch, we announced a change in our product release cycle. Our objective was to provide a more nimble and responsive approach to market demands and to more rapidly deliver new product enhancements on a predictable schedule.
For the most part, we have delivered on this promise! Quarterly releases consisting of two short-term support (STS) versions and two long-term support (LTS) per year have arrived either on schedule or shortly after the planned release date.
After two years, we have received feedback from many customers that it can be difficult to keep up with this release cadence, especially if they are on-premises or Flexibility Mode (PaaS) customers. Planning upgrades and executing them can be time-consuming and require coordination across several teams. This issue was particularly acute for x.3 and x.0 releases which occurred 90 days apart and were both LTS versions. Serenity Mode (SaaS) customers received new features automatically every 90 days — but even then, certain incremental improvements and enhancements could have been available even sooner.
Another challenge from our frequent release cycle is ensuring that the connectors and extensions developed and maintained by our technology partners are compatible with the latest releases. Our ecosystem is a very strong source of business value for Akeneo customers and we want to encourage it to grow and easily keep pace with our product releases.
Based on this customer and partner feedback, we have decided to further simplify our release cycle in order to better support everyone whether you’re an on-premises customer, a Flexibility Mode customer, a Serenity Mode customer, or a technology partner who develops extensions and connectors for the PIM.
What’s the new release schedule?
For on-premises and Flexibility Mode customers, our new release cycle will make it even easier to plan for upgrades and will reduce the number of upgrades necessary to keep pace with the latest feature and performance improvements.
Instead of two STS versions followed by two LTS versions each 90 days apart, we’ll release one major version every year for our on-premises and Flexibility Mode customers. These releases will be Long Term Support versions, which will remain at 18 months. Consequently, we will no longer do STS releases! This will reduce technical support complexity and confusion about how long your version is supported, as well as simplify project and upgrade planning for you and your solution partner or integrator.
For Serenity Mode customers, our new release schedule will enable us to deploy new features and improvements on a monthly basis instead of quarterly. You’ll receive more business value more frequently, with Akeneo taking care of upgrades on your behalf as we do today.
For planning purposes, our current release schedule and status of support will be as follows:
To support this transition, Akeneo PIM version 3.2 (shipped in July 2019) was announced as an STS version, but we will now consider it an LTS version and will support it through January 2021.
We will not release a “3.3” LTS release in October as previously planned.
The next major LTS release (version “4.0”) will occur in early 2020 approximately at the time of our annual Akeneo PIM Summit, and every 12 months thereafter. As always, should there be the need for patches in between annual releases, we’ll provide them as required.
SaaS releases will occur at the end of each week and your SaaS instance will be automatically upgraded by our team.
Here’s what the release schedule looks like in full color mode!
We believe this new release cycle will enable Akeneo to better serve our customers on all deployments while reducing disruption and simplifying version management and technical support for all. And we’re really excited about the new enhancements we are currently developing for 2020. We can’t wait to see you at Akeneo PIM Summit 2020 to tell you all about it!
How Product Information Leads To Social Selling Success
Power social selling with PIM! Learn why great product information helps drive conversions on Facebook, Instagram, and other emerging social sales channels
All told, nearly 3.5 billion people around the world (or 45% of the population), count themselves as active social media users. Social media is particularly popular in regions like North America, where 95% of internet users use social media, Northern Europe (95%), and Western Europe (94%), where nearly all internet users also have active accounts on social media networks. In terms of total users, Facebook is still king, boasting 2.2 billion active users, followed by YouTube (1.9 billion users), Asia’s WhatsApp (1.5 billion users) and WeChat (1.1 billion users), Instagram (1 billion users), and Pinterest (265 million users).
These social networks are popular places for communication and entertainment, but they’re also becoming powerful commercial platforms. Facebook, social media’s biggest player, has long offered sales via their Marketplace channel, but when it comes to promoting products, it lags behind a pair of fashion-forward platforms: Instagram and Pinterest. While these platforms fall behind Facebook in terms of user base, they convert customers at a far higher rate.
Instagram is top dog in that regard, with 72% of Instagram users reporting making purchase decisions based on something that they saw while browsing the app. 55% of Pinterest users, meanwhile, say they visit the site specifically to look for new products to purchase, more than 4 times the number of users who say the same for other social platforms.
So, whether you’re doing business on Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook, how can you ensure your social selling endeavors are a success? The answer lies in your product information — the assets, content, and data that help customers find and understand your offerings.
A flashy Facebook feed, intriguing Instagram story, or perfect Pin can help catch your potential customers’ attention, but won’t do you much good if your product information isn’t accurate, consistent, and high-quality.
If your product information isn’t up to par, then shoppers won’t convert into customers. They’ll struggle to find your products via search engines or social media apps or other means of discovery, and even if they do make their way to your eCommerce site, they’ll likely abandon the purchase.
It is, therefore, crucial to perfect your product information and convert social media scrollers into loyal customers.
Deliver accurate product information in place
While most eCommerce selling happens when customers are specifically searching for a product, social selling can be quite different.
Often, selling on social happens when products pop up in a user’s feed. They see it because they are following an influencer or perhaps they are following your brand. Suddenly they now to have it. Social media has an effect on impulse buying but to close the deal, your product information needs to be accessible and in context for social sales channels. Take an example from apparel – the first thing a prospective buyer wants to know is if it will fit them properly and can they get it in their favorite color. If they’re not confident in the information they do find, they’ll quickly abandon the prospective purchase. Easy come, easy go.
But you don’t want your customers going anywhere. You want them to buy directly from the social site (or navigate to and stay on your site), complete that purchase, and hopefully come back for more. Ensuring they don’t abandon requires answering their product information questions instantly, by providing accurate, consistent, and emotionally compelling product information in the moment.
Time is of the essence
Social media moves at the speed of light. Seemingly every second, there are hundreds of new posts waiting to populate your customers’ timelines and inspire them with new trends, styles, or innovations.
But just as quickly as these trends dominate the market, they fade away, becoming just another fad. That means it’s crucial to take advantage of every opportunity, seize every new seasonal offering and style, and move quickly, lest you risk being left behind in the digital dust. Each time a new trend makes its presence felt in your market, your organization needs to be ready to seize the moment and take advantage.
But if your team is stuck completing time-consuming, tedious catalog expansion or update process, you won’t be able to keep up with the social selling. The results, however, will be much worse than some lost followers or un-liked posts — say hello to declining sales or even increasing returns, as customers fail to get their purchases before a trend goes out of style.
PIM helps you eliminate this inefficient, tedious, and time-consuming labor. That means your team can focus on keeping up with changing trends and styles, and ensure they’re making relevant connections with their customers via social media.
Contextualize and distribute data
Accurate, consistent, and compelling product information and assets are crucial to social success — and so is speed. But even if those factors are taken care of, all those efforts will have been wasted if you aren’t presenting your product information for the channel shoppers are using.
As we addressed above, social selling customers are different beasts than their typical eCommerce compatriots. They don’t set out on a search for a specific product, and are highly subject to suggestion. All it takes is a peek at an appealing advertisement or a recommendation that piques their interest from a trusted influencer.
What’s more, each social media network offers its own best practices and requirements. Glossy, high-quality images with length captions rule the day on Instagram, hyper-shareable pictures and pins are the currency of the day on Pinterest, and Facebook has its own detailed and complicated web of rules for social sellers.
Use PIM tools that offer ways to pick exactly the content, data, and assets that you want to push to a specific social media network, and pay careful attention to the choices you make. By using PIM to present product information in the proper context, you’re more likely to connect with social media users and make a sale.
Power social selling with PIM
Social media platforms have the potential to be a particularly powerful tool for B2B and B2C organizations alike. These networks allow companies to reach massive audiences of customers and create new opportunities for communication and commerce.
But in order to take advantage of these opportunities, your product information needs to be up to par. Use PIM features and tools like automated business rules engines, validation workflows, export profiles, and more to more efficiently and successfully sell your products via social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.
Power social selling with PIM! Learn how PIM can help your team conquer these new sales channels with relative ease by reading our blog on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success or get in touch today!
Solve your B2B distribution problems with PIM! Discover how Product Information Management and Product Experience Management can help you conquer common industry challenges.
B2B distribution is being disrupted.
What was once a world limited to bulky catalogs, manual ordering and purchasing workflows, and pen-and-paper processes is getting with the times and going digital. Increasingly, as retailers work to drive growth and reach new buyers, print catalogs and other legacy ordering methods are being augmented with digital and omnichannel selling.
A second trend is the changing profile of B2B buyers, many of whom are digital natives. Given this trend, B2B distributors are seeking to deliver the B2C-like customer experiences these new B2B buyers are accustomed to.
There has also been a rapid rise in B2B eCommerce. Online sales in the U.S. alone grew by 11% to more than $1 trillion last year, and annual B2B sales are projected to top $10.6 trillion around the world in 2019. What’s more, this growth isn’t projected to change course anytime soon.
This digital transformation can, and should, be a boon to many B2B distributors’ bottom lines.
But most are struggling to bring their product catalogs into the 21st century. These organizations face challenges surrounding everything from data governance and collaboration to catalog and market expansion.
Fortunately, there is a solution that can help solve these challenges and clear B2B distribution roadblocks. Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Experience Management (PXM) solutions help B2B distributors more efficiently and easily manage large product catalogs and prepare for a successful digital transformation. B2B distributors using these solutions typically report increased conversions, reduced returns, and notably higher levels of marketer productivity after adopting PIM.
Below are a few examples of where and how PIM and PXM can help you solve these B2B distribution challenges.
Go Digital
Even with a single sales channel such as a print catalog, managing a large assortment of complex products including related products, add-ons, and spares, as well as images and documents for each is a massive undertaking. Factor in the diverse group of manufacturers and suppliers that distributors do business with, the differing formats they use to share product data, and it’s clear there’s enough going on to make your head spin.
Opening up a new commerce channel is always a labor-intensive undertaking, and given the catalog reality noted above, it’s clear there is much room for improvement and efficiency.
Whether your digital transformation initiative includes deploying an eCommerce site or just simplifying the way you share product information online, a PIM solution and a PXM approach make the digitization process a relative breeze. PIM offers a centralized place to manage disparate product data from internal systems and suppliers and to enrich it specifically for your print or eCommerce or website – and any other channel you choose to pursue. A major benefit is Akeneo PIM’s ability to put product data in context for each channel — because each channel has its own rules.
Efficiencies are also delivered in the form of business rules engines and validation workflows. With these and other PIM features your team can easily eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks and ensure that only accurate, consistent, and contextual product information is presented to customers in the format required for each channel.
Expand with ease
Widening your company’s reach to a new channel isn’t the only expansion opportunity B2B distributors face, of course.
As digital innovations makes cross-border commerce more feasible and offer the opportunity to increase your product assortment, it’s also crucial that your company is ready to add a new geographic market or product to its roster. But translating and localizing product information for such a large and diverse catalog can be a challenge for distributors, limiting the potential of new markets. And if your product information is already disorganized, inaccurate, or low-quality, adding new items to your product catalog can magnify the problem and further contribute to poor customer experiences.
Akeneo PIM speeds the product information management and new product introduction process, along with automation, completeness, validation features so you can get your products to market faster — across all channels and regions. What’s more, its ability to manage and control catalogs by locale and its connectivity with translation tools eases cross-border expansion and helps put your team on the road to international success.
Govern and control your data
Organizing and governing data can be a challenge in and of itself, but B2B distributors also face an additional hurdle. This information is commonly expressed and exchanged in industry-specific data formats which may or may not be appropriate in its raw state for use in a given channel. Furthermore, in an attempt to create a B2C-like buying experience, distributors need to massage and enrich product information according to each channel and its rules, as well as for each locale. A great example is adherence to regional compliance standards. All this makes it harder to manually manage product information and assets for omnichannel commerce. Add in the integration of the systems needed to handle and process this data and it’s a real trio of troubles.
Collaboration is also a key aspect of managing product information across different groups. This can be with respect to multiple teams internally as well as collaborating with suppliers. In this case, there needs to be a solid governance and control process in place to manage not only the data but also the users and their roles and privileges.
PIM and PXM are specifically designed to manage and govern data and user groups in these situations. Akeneo PIM can help your team more efficiently and easily manage product data and descriptions, and includes an advanced user management capability to help reliably control who can edit what, who approves the final catalog, and how to track and ensure the catalog is complete and accurate before you publish. It can also help your team simplify data management by integrating disparate systems and tools via our network of connectors and extensions, eliminating errors and inconsistencies in product information and helping ease distribution to your commerce platforms.
Boost productivity
B2B distributors need to move rapidly if they want to succeed. It takes agility and efficiency to keep up with new product introductions, entering new markets, and keeping pace with products that are quickly gaining or decreasing in popularity.
Dealing with all that data, however, can slow distributors down, hurting sales figures and revenue in the process. Low levels of operational collaboration and chaotic or inefficient workflows can make these problems even worse, and leave B2B distributors struggling to keep up with the increasing pace of modern commerce.
Akeneo PIM includes features like automation, validation, and workflow controls to eliminate unnecessary and repetitive tasks. That way you can more rapidly distribute and sell more products, boosting revenue and improving relationships with suppliers and customers along the way.
Conquer Industrial Manufacturing Challenges
It isn’t easy to be a B2B distribution company these days — but PIM and PXM can help. By using product information and product experience management solutions to enrich and manage your product data, your team can expand to new channels and locales more efficiently, handle industry-specific data formats with ease, and boost their productivity.
It’s the moment you’ve been waiting all summer for — the finale of The Goupil Experience is finally here!So far, we’ve seen our brave heroes …
It’s the moment you’ve been waiting all summer for — the finale of The Goupil Experienceis finally here!
So far, we’ve seen our brave heroes try just about everything they can think of to locate a new Goupil. From voice assistants to social media and from hotlines and catalogs to advertising and social media, nothing has worked. Now, Ake has become Julia’s full-time roommate — and it’s driving her nuts and making her boyfriend jealous!There’s seemingly no chance Ake will be able to return to his home time period, not with all the product information challenges that Goupil is facing. But maybe Julia’s boyfriend can help— even if he doesn’t realize it yet — and Ake can help him in return…Get your product information and product experience ready for the future! Learn how PIM and PXM can help your team conquer these new sales channels with relative ease by reading our blog on Turning A New Commerce Channel Into A Success or get in touch today!
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