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!
It’s the penultimate episode of The Goupil Experience, and Ake has just about given up hope. …
It’s the penultimate episode of The Goupil Experience, and Ake has just about given up hope.
After trying once again to locate a replacement for his Goupil time travel online, Ake and Julia figure their destiny is sealed. Ake is doomed to live out the remainder of his days in an unfamiliar, strange, and primitive time period, devoid of his family, friends, and any of his futuristic conveniences. Julia, meanwhile, has seemingly been sentenced to a lifetime of forced companionship with this strange acquaintance from a distant future decade who seemed to appear on the floor of her apartment out of thin air.But just as all seems lost, hope arrives in the form of a radio ad. Will Ake and Julia find the solution to their problem in seemingly the most unlikely of places?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!
[Video] Goupil Experience #4: When All Else Fails, Try Amazon
It’s time for another episode of our summer comedy video series, The Goupil Experience! In last week’s edition, Ake and Julia turned to Goupil’s…
It’s time for another episode of our summer comedy video series, The Goupil Experience!
In last week’s edition, Ake and Julia turned to Goupil’s strangely-organized catalog and not-so-helpful customer service in hopes of finding the replacement time travel controller. However, instead of finally securing a new controller and sending Ake back home, the pair were only met with more product information problems.Now, as Julia continues to become more frustrated with her futuristic squatter, she recommends he turn to the internet’s one-stop-shop for 2019 consumers: Amazon. Surely, the online marketplace known for selling everything from A-to-Z will be able to provide a solution — or will it?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!
Akeneo at #DMEXCO19: Explore — Inspire — Discover!
Summer is in full swing, and that can only mean one thing — it’s time to get ready for DMEXCO!
Summer is in full swing, and that can only mean one thing — it’s time to get ready for DMEXCO!
DMEXCO 2019 (Digital Marketing Expo & Conference), the leading trade fair for the digital industry, will once again attract thousands of visitors from all over the world to Cologne, Germany in September. And as in previous years, Akeneo will be there in full force!
Continue reading “Akeneo at #DMEXCO19: Explore — Inspire — Discover!”
Welcome to episode 3 — we’re mid-way through our summer comedy video series, The Goupil Experience! On the last episode of The Goupil Experience, …
Welcome to episode 3 — we’re mid-way through our summer comedy video series, The Goupil Experience!
On the last episode of The Goupil Experience, Ake and Julia turned to the wisdom of the crowd, hoping that social media could help Ake find a replacement Goupil time travel controller to return to his own time period. Unfortunately, the social experiment didn’t go as hoped. Instead of finding a controller, the pair found only frustration — and a healthy dose of internet conspiracy — as consulting both the official Goupil page and Julia’s 2019 friends failed to produce the product they searched for. If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself. They’ve got their hands on a Goupil catalog and are headed right to the source. They plan to call up the company directly so they can find a new controller for Ake and get him out of Julia’s hair. Check out our latest video to find out!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!
[VIDEO] Goupil Experience #2: Social Selling Struggles
Welcome to episode 2 of our summer comedy video series, The Goupil Experience! Last time we left our friends Ake and Julia, Ake was desperately trying…
Welcome to episode 2 of our summer comedy video series, The Goupil Experience!
Last time we left our friends Ake and Julia, Ake was desperately trying to find a replacement to his Goupil time travel controller so he can return to his home time period — but he’s having some difficulty. After initially hoping to find the object of his desire by communicating with a home shopping assistant, Ake discovered that Goupil’s product information was poorly referenced, leaving his voice assistant “Timmy” unable to locate the product he needed. In this latest episode of The Goupil Experience, we rejoin Ake and Julia as they turn to social media after failing to find the Goupil controller via voice assistant. Will the pair have more success by turning to Twitter and Facebook, or will they be lost in a web of poor product information and internet conspiracy theories? Check out our latest video to find out!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!
How to Choose a Systems Integrator — A Q&A with Infoverity
Once the decision has been made to hire a systems integrator for a Product Information Management (PIM) implementation, either for the entire job or to supplement a company’s internal team, there are several key factors to consider.
Once the decision has been made to hire a systems integrator for a Product Information Management (PIM) implementation, either for the entire job or to supplement a company’s internal team, there are several key factors to consider. Akeneo recently spoke with Mike Luthman, a Senior Consultant with Infoverity, to get his thoughts on the typical selection criteria used by their customers.
Q: What are the key questions your customers typically ask when evaluating a systems integrator?
The best systems integrator is the one who can deliver real business value, effectively design the technology solution to map to the business needs, and whose experience closely matches the specific requirements of the customer’s project. To that end, customers should ask:
How does the integrator align with my business drivers and pain points consistently throughout the effort?
Does the integrator have extensive experience in your industry? Do you have examples or use cases we can review?
Does the integrator have expertise in data and digital strategy, demonstrate thought leadership and offer strategic consulting?
Does the integrator have dedicated consultants on the team with project management experience and knowledge of all the latest technologies, trends, and best practices?
Has the integrator worked with companies of a similar fit? Examples may include: companies with a similar level of integration complexity, those with data sourced from external vendors/suppliers, or those with a geographically dispersed user base.
Is the integrator an organizationally and financially stable company?
Does the integrator provide post-implementation services and support?
Q: At what point does a systems integrator get involved, and how can the systems integrator help Akeneo with sales process?
A: A systems integrator such as Infoverity can enter at various times in the cycle.
Sometimes systems integrators get involved very early in the sales cycle, particularly if the client is in need of guidance around solution best practices, business process, change management or project delivery/phasing approach. This could take the form of an early discovery phase to help frame the program. Alternatively, the client may desire a more formal and in-depth strategy and roadmap exercise to lay out a longer-term vision for the data and systems landscape and evolution. The system integrator being evaluated should have significant experience to support the strategic needs of the specific client.
Other times an integrator comes in to support the RFI/RFP process. We work directly with a vendor like Akeneo to complement the technical tool capabilities and cost responses with a solution methodology for project planning, execution and post go-live hypercare or extended production support.
Finally, an integrator may be brought in after the vendor/software has already been selected and the client is seeking a partner for program strategy and/or implementation.
We certainly prefer to be involved as early as possible, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the specific use cases that are being addressed in the initial phase. Plus, we need to understand the longer-term vision, to ensure the first phase establishes a solid foundation to build upon.
Q: What are the typical business challenges faced by companies seeking a PIM/PXM or data governance solution?
A: The typical business challenges include the need to:
Evolve their web presence to deliver an enhanced customer experience, beyond a transactional commerce focus
Create an intuitive, clean interface for data management, product categorization, and copy editing
Provide a clean, consistent, easily-searchable product catalog
Customize the catalog to the customer segment – geography, role/purpose (B2B distributor versus the B2C consumer), branding, product offerings by market
And for Data Governance I would also include data quality. The major challenge is in getting complete, accurate and timely data to drive the digital experience. As much effort that goes into creating an intuitive, seamless site experience should also be spent in the authoring and enrichment of the data that serves as the bedrock for successful customer experiences.
Product information authored by multiple product lines or geographically-oriented teams can often follow their own standards (or none), and make data aggregation more challenging. We partner with the client to drive governance and quality processes as early in the product data life-cycle to more easily support the desired customer experience.
Q: Are there industry or regulatory standards that must be supported? Can you give an example of something that has become more of a challenge for integrators over time, due to the evolving nature of PIM/PXM implementations?
A: Yes, and a quality systems integrator will understand the standards that must be supported. They will have policies and procedures in place to help guarantee adherence to these tenets, and design and implement solutions and systems that comply with them.
Some examples include:
EPA/regulatory requirements for companies with consumer products that have safety regulations
Ingredient labeling requirements (e.g. for beer companies)
EPA manufacturing requirements (e.g. for nail polish, detergent, etc)
Appliance consumer-testing and safety-labeling data
eCl@ss, a cross-industry product data standard for classification and description of products and services, emphasizing compliance with ISO/IEC industry standards, both nationally and internationally.
ETIM, a worldwide uniform classification for technical products attributes or “features” that are needed for a product with a given classification.
Maintaining industry standard categorization/classification is critical to driving customer experience.
Q: As a systems integrator, what tendencies is Infoverity seeing in the PIM/PXM market recently?
A: Clients are emphasizing the digital customer experience, and the need to ensure consistent brand experiences across channels, geographies, and sites. Digital marketing needs are also evolving, due to data-driven consumer demands and insights on buying behaviors. All of this is increasing the pressure to provide all the information to the fingertips of the consumer to support their buying decisions and create loyalty.
Having a comprehensive data strategy to acquire, enrich and utilize product data is being seen as a foundational component to power the digital customer experience now and in the future.
About Infoverity
Founded in 2011, Infoverity is a leading systems integrator and global professional services firm that provides MDM and PIM Strategy and Implementation, Data Governance and Analytics, Content Management, Data Integration, Enterprise Hosting and Managed Services that help large enterprises in the retail, consumer goods, manufacturing, financial and healthcare sectors to simplify and maximize the value of their information. Infoverity, a 100% employee-owned company, is on the Inc. 5000, is recognized by IDG’s Computerworld as one of the Best Places to Work in IT, as a Wonderful Workplace for Young Professionals and as a Best Place to Work by Business First. Infoverity’s global headquarters is in Dublin, Ohio, the EMEA headquarters and Global Development Center is in Valencia, Spain and additional offices are located in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway and Russia. For more information on Infoverity solutions, visit Infoverity.com, follow @Infoverity on Twitter, or contact us today.
This summer, Akeneo invites you to sit back, relax and experience the future of commerce by following along with our comedy video series, The Goupil E…
This summer, Akeneo invites you to sit back, relax and experience the future of commerce by following along with our comedy video series, The Goupil Experience. Over the next six weeks, we’ll bring you a weekly episode featuring the exploits of Ake, a lost time traveler and our heroine Julia as they try to find the product they’re looking for to allow Ake to return to his proper year.
Commerce isn’t what it used to be. These days, it seems that all customers need to do to find and eventually purchase a product they want or need is to ask for it. “Alexa,” millions of shoppers can be heard saying, “show me…”While this constant connectivity offers plenty of opportunity to brands and retailers, it also presents a challenge. These companies need to make sure that consumers can easily find details on potential purchases — because if they don’t, consumers won’t be able to find their products on any of their devices — even if they’re from the future.Just ask Ake. As you can see in the video below, he desperately needs to find a replacement Goupil controller after his faulty futuristic device dumped him in our time period — decades earlier than his own. Now, he needs to search through a jungle of inconsistent, inaccurate, or just plain bad product information, along with the help of his friend Julia, if he wants to return home. 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!
Akeneo Product Cloud
Product Cloud Packages
Shopify
Adobe
Salesforce
SAP
See All Integrations
Professional Services
Training & Certification
Support & Help Center
PX Strategy Self Assessment
The Akeneo Partner Ecosystem
Blog
Resource Library
Seasonal Release
Register
![[Video] Goupil Experience Finale!](https://www.akeneo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Goupil-thumbnail_6.png)
![[Video] Goupil Experience # 5: Advertising Adversity](https://www.akeneo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Goupil-thumbnail_5.png)
![[Video] Goupil Experience #4: When All Else Fails, Try Amazon](https://www.akeneo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Goupil-thumbnail_4.png)
![[Video] Goupil Experience #3 – Not-So-Hot Hotline](https://www.akeneo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Goupil-thumbnail_3.png)
![[VIDEO] Goupil Experience #2: Social Selling Struggles](https://www.akeneo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Goupil-thumbnail_2.png)
![[VIDEO] Introducing The Goupil Experience](https://www.akeneo.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/banner_goupil_experience_video1.png)