Six Ways to Make Your Product Information More Agile

Product information isn’t simply data to be stored away, and accessed only when absolutely necessary. It’s an essential part of ongoing communications...

  1. chevron left iconSix Ways to Make Your Product Information More Agile
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censhare Editorial TeamApril 12, 2017
  • Product Information Management

Product information isn’t simply data to be stored away, and accessed only when absolutely necessary. It’s an essential part of ongoing internal activity and external communications and must feed into and evolve with your business - informing new campaigns, driving new sales and empowering staff across the business.

In order to make this happen, businesses should be looking at connected product information management (PIM) systems that are part of an integrated marketing platform. This approach enables you to meet the challenges of the New Age of Communication, in which you must simultaneously reach out to a wider and wider audience, while delivering personalized, localized content. It also positions marketing as a driver of growth and success. Here’s how…

1. Break down silos

Breaking down the walls between marketing, sales and product teams aid collaboration and increases efficiency. As well as giving content producers a direct line to important details from product teams, this approach also means your sales team has greater access to brand information and inbound data. In fact, businesses are 67% better at closing deals when sales and marketing work together, so it’s no surprise that 23% of marketers already rate breaking down silos as a top priority.

2. Ensure brand consistency

Hosting all product, brand and marketing data on a single PIM platform ensures that product and brand information is completely consistent across the entire business. Because every department, team and individual can access the same information, at the right time, from a single place, there are always eyes on the details, and errors or oversights are more likely to be picked up and corrected. It also eliminates needless duplication and repetition of content and data—another set of tasks where errors can creep in.

3. Build flexible systems

To make this data work for you in more creative ways, your PIM systems also have to be flexible. The censhare PIM system is built on a semantic network that saves data, metadata, and, most importantly, how each piece of data relates to one another. This means your teams will be able to see the broader context into which the data fits, helping them understand the bigger picture, think more creatively, and use more data more productively. This can range from seeing how the latest content impacted quarterly sales figures to tracing product development through a hierarchy of changing iterations.

4. Keep systems simple

A semantic graph-driven database seamlessly provides the information and assets you need, with all the inherent complexity hidden from view. The visual representations illustrate both data and connections clearly, in a way that anyone can understand. This reduces the time your team will spend analyzing data assets and attempting to find uses for them -- and gives everyone clear access to the same information.

5. Connect your assets

By connecting data, the walls between your discrete systems are also removed, improving process and data sharing. And because it’s all on a single platform, risks like data duplication, leaks and privacy concerns are reduced. That said, if you do need to share data with external platforms, censhare’s PIM systems allow simple (and even automated) export via XML or REST.

6. Create scalable spaces

Most importantly of all, however, an integrated system can grow alongside the business, scaling and remaining fast, effective and productive -- aiding the wider success of the business. The more data you build into the database, the more rich and creative the semantic network becomes. And the more your departments and teams collaborate, the more integrated your business culture will be.

All this comes from placing content, and product data, first. Find out more about how an integrated PIM system can helps you do this in our whitepaper A Modern Approach to Marketing Product Information.

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censhare Editorial Team

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