5 advantages of using a PIM for your business

For organizations like e-commerce retailers and manufacturers, managing large amounts of product information across multiple channels is essential to their success.

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This is where Product Information Management (PIM) software can play an incredibly useful role.

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PIM is a centralized system that optimizes the distribution of product data across various sales and marketing channels. It consolidates all product-related information, making it ideal for businesses with dynamic product ranges and frequent updates. 

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A PIM allows users to aggregate and collate product descriptions, ensuring data is consistent and on-brand across myriad channels, offline and online. This way, businesses can mitigate the risk of errors and inconsistencies in product information, safeguarding their brand reputation and maintaining a stellar customer experience. 

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Now that you know more about PIM, let’s take a deeper dive into 5 of its advantages and answer the all important question: does your organization need Digital Asset Management (DAM), PIM, or both?

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Here are those 5 advantages:

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- Shorten time-to-market

- Increased efficiency

- Enhanced customer experience

- Reduced costs

- Supporting vendors and suppliers

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1. Shorten time-to-market

Thanks to advanced workflows and automations, organizations can use PIM to update, validate, and track data in record time. The PIM platform becomes a Single Source of Truth within your organization that distributes the right information uniformly across all channels. 

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It also enhances collaboration and improves efficiency across departments and between multiple suppliers and systems — one of the biggest stumbling blocks to launching products on time.

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Therefore, with PIM, products hit the market quickly and new product launches become much faster. And with multichannel delivery and distribution, personalized content experiences reach customers on their preferred channels. If product information changes or becomes outdated, PIM software ensures that this can be updated in real-time and from one central location, maintaining continuity and a positive customer experience. 

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2. Increased efficiency

As mentioned above, one of the major advantages of using a PIM for your business is increased operational efficiency.

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PIM software helps organizations to overcome issues like decentralized processes and systems, siloed product information and digital assets, and an inability to collaborate between business teams and partners, to name just three.

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But how exactly does PIM do this? 

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With features like bulk updates, auto-tagging, and workflows, that’s how.

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Rather than manually updating an entire product range when prices change, for example, organizations can use bulk updates to amend large volumes of data in one go. Once these changes are loaded into the PIM system, they’re then reflected in real-time across all sales channels. 

Workflows are a game-changer for larger teams working in different areas of product enrichment. They ensure that products are never listed without missing or inaccurate information. For example, if you receive product data in different formats from different suppliers, you can set a rule to standardize this information like automatically changing GRY to GREY. 

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3. Enhanced customer experience

With PIM, the product experience becomes entirely customer-centric. 

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Inconsistent and unstructured data goes into the PIM system and out comes accurate, streamlined information that’s ready to be shared across all touchpoints.

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With this information, sales and marketing teams can create fulfilling customer experiences and appealing campaigns that ultimately result in higher return on investment (ROI). After all, high quality and timely product information — particularly stock availability or  delivery time — will significantly impact customers’ decision making. 

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4. Reduced costs

The automation made possible by PIM allows businesses to reduce headcount and/or maximize the productivity of existing teams without impacting the service they provide customers. Quite the opposite, in fact.

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Low value tasks that take considerable time when completed manually — e.g. updating product information or emailing another department to help them find some product specifications — can be automated and replaced with value-added tasks.

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For retail and ecommerce brands, this means more time for strategy that improves their bottom line. For example, thinking up creative campaigns that build brand awareness or optimizing the customer journey. 

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For heavily regulated industries like life sciences, PIM acts as the central hub for the management and execution of data. Business-led controls and audit trails streamline compliance, avoiding costs and penalties associated with data errors. 

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5. Supporting vendors and suppliers

One of the biggest advantages for using a PIM for your business is the fact that it supports so much more than just your business. It also supports the partners, vendors, and suppliers you work with, enabling them to quickly and easily access product information.

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This streamlines, accelerates, and automates supplier data, strengthening collaboration between a brand and its various partners, optimizing supply chains, and improving demand forecasting.

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If your organization is currently communicating with third parties via emails and spreadsheets, this runs the risk of delays and mismanagement. A few challenges that may arise from this manual form of collaboration include a lack of clarity about vendor performance, poor visibility into transactions, and the absence of airtight audit trails.

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Unless and until you implement a unified interface to connect with suppliers and vendors, communication gaps, data silos, and compliance and management issues will continue to put a strain on growing brands.

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Why you should integrate DAM and PIM

Now you know more about PIM, you might be wondering whether your business would benefit most from PIM, DAM or both.

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As you’ve already discovered, PIM is a system of record for all your product information. It consolidates descriptions, specifications, SKUs, and thousands of other product attributes into one easily accessible place.

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What PIM doesn’t do is store digital assets that have been created for those products. That’s the job of DAM technology. 

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And while some platforms let you push assets from DAM into PIM software, there’s so much more potential to be unlocked by using a system that provides (and integrates) best-in-class versions of both.

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For starters, product information is automatically attached to your content, which can then be published directly to ecommerce sites. For large product and retail companies, the benefits of this compound into a huge time and money saver. Product managers and commerce teams can get products to market faster, while brand and marketing teams can execute campaigns more efficiently than ever before.

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Want to find out more about the benefits of PIM for your business? Book your free demo today to discuss how our team can support you with a smooth migration. 

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