"Growing Business is Our Business"
An estimated 67 percent of the buyer’s journey now takes place online. And as a result, brands are developing digital marketing strategies at increasing rates.
As brands compete on the digital marketing battleground, a clear differentiation is appearing among organizations just starting out in search, those that are developing and scaling customer-centric content strategies and the innovators that stay ahead of their digital marketing competition.
In a content market where spend is forecast to grow to over $300 billion in the next four years, modern-day marketers are building holistic digital marketing strategies that span across search, social and content marketing disciplines. This convergence of paid, owned and earned media strategies means marketing teams must work cross-functionally to support company-wide growth.
With collaboration and growth come the challenges of scale, and as marketers look to integrate content into digital strategies, organizing for success becomes a top operational priority.
As brands compete on the digital marketing battleground, a clear differentiation is appearing among organizations just starting out in search, those that are developing and scaling customer-centric content strategies and the innovators that stay ahead of their digital marketing competition.
In a content market where spend is forecast to grow to over $300 billion in the next four years, modern-day marketers are building holistic digital marketing strategies that span across search, social and content marketing disciplines. This convergence of paid, owned and earned media strategies means marketing teams must work cross-functionally to support company-wide growth.
With collaboration and growth come the challenges of scale, and as marketers look to integrate content into digital strategies, organizing for success becomes a top operational priority.
In this “print first, digital second” world of B2B, putting hundreds of thousands or even millions of products online is a daunting prospect. We don’t have product data production operations – instead we have catalog teams and databases, and we do our best to repurpose that catalog content on-line. This may help us get started or get by, but it’s not what we need to compete in a “digital first” world.
If we want to compete in a digital world, we need to invest in digitizing our product information. What does that entail? Doing lots of things we didn’t do in the physical world. In this post I’ll list the Big Three new things we need to do to manage product information to compete in a digital world.
Well-organized Product Taxonomy
First, managing product information and publishing it to multiple channels (including websites and print catalogs) requires developing a well-organized product taxonomy. A taxonomy is a hierarchy of types of products, and includes the attributes we need to display and search on products. How many of us even thought about taxonomy when publishing our Big Book? Taxonomy helps us manage products in a Product Information Management system (PIM) – the one-stop shop for managing information your customers need to discover, compare, buy, and use your products. The PIM contains everything we need to display products in our on-line catalog as well as a in a print catalog. Taxonomy enables the PIM to map products to channels, then flow the information any given channel requires from the PIM system.
Flesh Out Your Product AttributesThe second major new thing we need to do is be thoughtful about product attributes – the features that are displayed and used for navigation. What features do we need for our customers to find the products they need? Which attributes do we need to display, and which ones do we need to show as search filters or comparison features? Which ones matter most to our customers? Which ones do our competitors show on their sites? Attributes are powerful, but every one we add comes with a cost – the cost of populating the data for every product in our portfolio with that attribute.
Data Entry, Data Entry, Data EntryWhich leads to the third and most daunting new activity: entering the data for every attribute, for every product in the portfolio. Manufacturers struggle to get this data from product managers and marketers because before now, it was nobody’s job. To assure compliance after a transformation, most manufacturers require detailed product data as part of the product lifecycle Phase Gate process – now it’s somebody’s job, it’s important, and it’s inspected. We can’t launch the product if we don’t enter the data that describes it.
Distributors struggle even harder to get detailed data from product manufacturers. One product management leader at a top industrial supply firm told me this story: Imagine that you sell 1000 different flashlights in your catalog – all kinds, with different features and capabilities, and different applications. Now imagine that you source these 1000 flashlights from 100 different manufacturers. Lastly, imagine that you require each manufacturer to supply 20 or more technical attributes (e.g. brightness, brightness settings, hours of service, battery type, batteries included, housing material, waterproof, submersible depth, etc.) and up to 20 logistical attributes (GTIN; pallet/case/package dimensions, weight, and quantity; minimum order quantity; warranty, etc.). You have three choices for getting this information: get it from the manufacturer in a file (usually a spreadsheet); get it from a third party in an XML feed (e.g. IDW or Trade Services); or gather it yourself. Usually, if you want it done right – comprehensive, accurate, well-formed – provide the data you need to compete.