Marketing Resource Management Case Study: PIM Marketing

No matter what the product support (brochure, newsletter, web page or iPad catalog …), the same elements are always needed:

• photos of the product
• price
• description and characteristics
• accessories
• related products
• user feedback, etc.

If your company has a library or a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system, it is easy to recover photos. But the search for other elements can seem like an unending marathon: mail exchanges, phone calls, business team office visits . . . and you can’t be sure that you’ve even recovered good information!

I want to talk today about the solution to these problems: PIM Marketing.

What is a PIM Marketing?

A Product Information Management (PIM) Marketing system brings together all relevant product information across various business systems, and consolidates them for use by and for marketing teams.

The PIM marketing interface resembles in many ways product presentation on an e-commerce site: Amazon or Apple are two good examples.

What are the differences between DAM or PLM?

While these solutions manage all content, the essential difference lies in the type and completeness of the data managed by each system.

• DAM manages visuals (eg product photos) and their associated metadata.

• PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) covers the lifecycle of the product and production-related data: product references, technical descriptions, SKU, etc.

• In PIM Marketing there is more heterogeneous data:
  • marketing data (specifications, patents, images)
  • user data (comments, ratings, …)
  • technical data (characteristics, composition, …)
  • pricing
  • logistics data such as dimensions, presentation packaging, transport arrangements

Thus, PIM Marketing aggregates product data from various solutions such as DAM or PLM, and offers a comprehensive and transnational vision of the product, before any marketing, commercial, or communication actions.

3. What are the benefits of PIM marketing?

Making product data usable by marketing teams, regardless of their location, results in savings.

Ensure the validity of the information

Have confidence in the accuracy of the latest draft: with the centralization of information, everyone is sure to get approved and up-to-date information.

Multichannel content distribution

Often the contents of a product can be found on the same website, even if it is scripted differently. From a practical point of view, we see teams copy and paste. Beyond the risk of error, invalidity and incoherence, these are time-consuming tasks with little reward. The pooling of content by PIM marketing allows for centralized data that can be disseminated according to predefined rules depending on the different media.  Guaranteed zero error and consistent information regardless of the channels fed.

Responsiveness

With an up-to-the-minute and easily accessible data sheet, launching a campaign can be immediate. Often, the reverse is true: a company’s decision to launch a campaign triggers the updating of data or product information forms.

International

Centralized data allows for the simultaneous spread of data across many regions and in many languages. All teams, no matter where they are located, can access the same information at the time. This represents a significant time savings and reduced time-to-market.

4. What IT ecosystem integrates PIM Marketing:

As we have seen, PIM is at the heart of a company’s information system and must be integrated:

• upstream with DAM solutions, PLM, ERP, or database suppliers,
• downstream with different publication channels that use the data: Web CMS, e-commerce sites, mobile applications, print publications, etc.

In addition, beyond content, PIM Marketing manages their entire life cycle (creation, translation and distribution) and at the same time controls the quality of the disseminated data.

Conclusion

A Marketing Resource Management solution is an ideal candidate for PIM Marketing.

Indeed, it already contains a DAM and powerful content, management and workflow functions; it has the capacity to target native publication channels, and finally it typically offers many ways to interface with third-party solutions.

Please do not hesitate to contact our team for more information.