Organizations must understand the effective management of product content life cycle to optimize product experience. This blog highlights best practices to manage PCL.
- What is your strategy for keeping product content fresh and exciting?
- Do you find it difficult to keep product content enriched and engaging over time?
- How do you ensure that your product content reaches the right audience?
- Do you think it's essential to change product content regularly? Why or why not?
Could you relate yourself to the above question? If not, with all, maybe a few of them.
The crucial point here is how to manage product content for delivering amazing experiences.
But keeping up with constantly changing customer behavior and market trends can be difficult, especially when customers engage in a multichannel, multi-touchpoint, multi-experience buying journey. And, as the number of channels to market increases, so does the significance of product content lifecycle management.
An effective product content management strategy ensures that your product information is accurate, trusted, and consistent across all channels, from the web, mobile, marketplaces, and social to POS.
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Stages of Product Content Lifecycle (PCL):
The complex product content lifecycle (PCL) is increasingly being understood as an end-to-end process. Effective product content management aims to ensure that customers always have accurate and timely information about products, no matter where they are in their buying journey.
There are four critical stages in the product content lifecycle (PCL):
- Planning and development: The first stage where you determine what kind of product information you need to create and how it will be used.
- Creation and enrichment: The next stage where you create or gather the necessary product information.
- Publication and syndication: Third stage is where you make the product information available to your customers through channels such as your website, product catalogs, and social media.
- Evaluation and optimization: This is final the stage where you track the performance of your product content and make changes to improve its effectiveness.
Best Practices to Manage and Optimize the End-To-End PCL:
Once product data is delivered across various channels, organizations need to understand the effectiveness of the product experience in order to optimize product content. Here are the best practices to manage PCL.
1. Implement an MDM Strategy for Core Product Data:
Product content is the heart of any eCommerce business, and it needs to be accurate and complete across all channels to ensure a consistent customer experience. But you need strong governance and data consistency for product SKUs, product names, variant attributes, and product dimensions to centrally manage end-to-end product content and keep it in sync across all your sales channels. Attempts to create an optimized product content life cycle remain incomplete and off-target without effective master data management.
Master data management (MDM) software helps you create a uniform data set by providing a single source of truth for your product content. Governance through MDM ensures that product master data is fit for purpose — meaning it is complete, accurate and available to optimize the product content life cycle. Using MDM, when all your concerned departments work with the same up-to-date information, your customers always see accurate product details regardless of where they shop.
Master Data Management: A Complete Guide
2. Create a Single Source of Truth to Drive Optimized Product Experiences:
Product teams often need to work with multiple stakeholders to ensure that the content is accurate and up-to-date. This approach considers all the different types of product information, including descriptions, reviews, images, and videos. In addition, as products evolve over time, so too does the product content. A 360-degree view of product information can help to overcome these challenges. Pulling content across the organization into a single repository makes it easier to keep track of changes and ensure that everyone is working with accurate and trusted information. In addition, a centralized product content repository can help to optimize the customer experience by making it easier for customers to find the information they need.
3. Use a PIM or Product Experience Management (PXM) Solution to Improve Consumption and Usage:
Product content is often siloed in different systems, making it difficult to manage and optimize. PIM or PXM solutions provide a centralized platform for managing product data and digital assets, making it easy to keep track of changes and ensure that the latest information is always available. By enabling marketers and product experts to enhance content and data quickly, PXM solutions help improve consumption and data use. These systems also improve how product information is presented on different channels, making it more engaging and easier to consume.
Also Read- From Information to Experience: Journey of PIM to PXM
4. Prepare for New Channels and Touchpoints by Anticipating Syndication Needs:
As the marketing world continues to evolve, brands need to be prepared for new channels and touchpoints. One way to do this is by anticipating syndication needs. Product content, for example, can be repurposed for various channels, from social media to email newsletters. By understanding how your content will be used across different platforms, you can ensure that it's always up-to-date and accurate. Additionally, you'll be able to measure the performance of your content and make necessary adjustments more effectively.
5. Analyze the Effectiveness of Product Content Data:
Product content data helps us understand how our products are being used and how effective they are in various channels. This data can be used to improve the product content life cycle management and make sure that the products you create are being used in the most effective way possible. Once this data is collected, it can be analyzed to see what is working well and what could be improved. This analysis can then be used on target channels and feedback into product content life cycle management to improve usage.
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6. Optimize Fulfillment and Supply Chain Management:
The final component of an end-to-end product content life cycle is the orchestration and routing of orders coming from various remote channels. Data on these transactions must be managed for the supply chain management. Still, digitally mature companies may already have a fully customized order management system (OMS) in place that can handle flexibility with input data depending upon what they need at any given moment.
However, if multiple OMSs present, it becomes more complicated to transfer this information between them all - especially since some vendors provide their individual solutions too! PXM providers understand how APIs work across different platforms, allowing them to ease into integrating and simplify order routing and orchestration from syndicated channels for the supply chain management.
PIM systems work excellently with the APIs of common channels and can be easily integrated into the originator’s supply chain. Therefore, a logical next step is to accept the order feeds from these channels, transform them as needed for the originator, and route them to the correct OMS.
Finally, don't forget about customer feedback! Always be on the lookout for ways to improve your product content based on what customers tell you. With these tips in mind, you're well on your way to creating effective product content that meets your customers' needs.
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